A brief digression on combat

As near as anyone has been able to tell, all combat — spell and melee and ranged — boils down to two possible die rolls.

Do you hit?

How much damage do you do?

Dodge/parry/miss/hit/crit… all are squeezed into one table. Through trial and error and test again we THINK we know some facts about this. For example, we THINK miss can never go below 1%. Level affects the ability to hit, in that it’s easier to hit someone less skilled than you (and harder to go the other way).

Damage modifiers include not only the range of damage but things like armor, resistance, penetration, and certain results off the hit table (crit, for example).

In my previous post about hit and crits and such, you can see this though it’s unstated. A key question became: which is better, more hits or harder hits per period of time? Always, always, always… It Depends. PVE or PVP? Boss or trash, grinding or one-off? The more you optimize for one, the weaker you are for another.

And all the tests and formulas pale to one final, extremely important element:

You’re doing this for fun. If it is not fun, don’t do it. And if it IS fun, even if “by the numbers” it seems wrong… screw the numbers. Have fun.

About…

I've experience with many priests of many races and specs on several servers. The more I play, the more I realize how much I do not yet know. This is a share of some of what I have learned.
My main these days is Zingiber on the Undermine server.